#like… it reeks of a certain flavor of ableism that I can’t pin down

[starryoak]

Gonna step my toes in the stupidest discourse waters possible, but personal musings (that I’ve told literally any person who will listen to me);

You’re all going to hear a rant I have about a shallow crossover comparison that’s way too popular. With the caveat that I’m not actually, like, upset with anyone for enjoying it, I just think it’s not as logical as some people make it out to be, and I think it warrants thinking about why it’s so popular despite the incongruity, if you’re into thinking about media and the things it can accidentally imply.

When people do Heathers crossovers with Danganronpa, it’s very logical to do so, as both are stories about the cruelty and murder of teenagers and how society affects them, but the single most common choice for JD is literally a character who is the total opposite of JD, Nagito Komaeda.

I especially see it done with the song Meant To Be Yours (bomb ass song btw) and that they’re made out to be similar because of that, the only thing they actually share is bombs and mental illness, and it makes me kinda wary that that’s what they’re boiled down to, honestly, like no one thinks past that.  

Down to the core of their characters, they’re polar opposites in their very moral foundations. Think about what they believe and what they’re like; JD hates the social system that birthed him and wants to blow it all up to show how fucked up it is. … and Komaeda obsessively loves the social system that birthed him and adores everything about it and would literally kill himself to uphold it despite how fucked up it is.

Let me boil it down to the most very basic; JD thinks ‘system bad, destroy the system’ and Komaeda thinks ‘love the system, I’d do anything to uphold the system.’

They’re literal polar opposites in terms of philosophy.

I don’t understand how someone could listen to JD’s ranting about the bomb plot in ‘Meant To Be Yours’ and not grasp that he hates society, and then think ‘yeah, that fits Komaeda, whose main defining trait is his obsessive adherence to the social structure of Hope’s Peak’.

I get it, bombs are cool, and it’s a thing now to do Komaeda as JD, like, a lot, but I have to admit, it still irks me to see how hard people missed the point of both their characters to reach their conclusions. It’s like they look at both characters and ignore everything about them besides ‘oh, wow, they’re crazy and want to blow things up, they’re exactly the same!’

sorry, the morals part does get me, like… the actual song Meant To Be Yours is literally all about how JD hates society, how can you ignore that and say ‘yeah, this fits Komaeda’

The entire point of Komaeda’s character is that he’s obsessed with upholding the system. You have to willfully ignore everything about both of them besides that they’ve blown stuff up and aren’t in their right minds, up to and including the actual text of the song itself, to connect them together through it, and honestly it genuinely does frustrate me that people boil down their characters into ‘crazy guy that loves bombs’.

It feels weird and almost… not maliciously ableist or anything, but ableist adjacent? I’m not sure how to word it, and I entirely realize I’m reading too much into a stupid crossover trend done for fun, but I do think if you’re into thinking critically, it’s interesting to muse on.

And again, to be clear, I’m aware that 99% of the people making things like this are just doing it cause it’s fun to draw stuff like that and have Nagito making crazy expressions (absolutely fun) and they aren’t wrong to do so, I just think it’s interesting to discuss stuff like this even if the answer is just ‘lol, cause it’s fun’.

I know I’m an anal wad whose obsessed with the text of fiction, but it really just sometimes hits me that other people take such different things away from the game than I did, lol. I guess it comes down to ultimately that, to me, a characters motivations for why they do what they do matter more than their specific actions, especially when it’s for crossovers and connecting characters, and for some people, the opposite is true.